\nWe are hiring a PHP Staff Engineer to focus on backend application work and technical leadership while contributing to DevOps, data, and frontend work as necessary. We’re a small team, so the blend will depend on the individual and the project.\n\n\nIdeal candidates will have an incredibly strong Web SaaS background, a decade or two of Web-based professional history, and a deep comfort with PHP. You are consistently assessing whether technical choices are adding or removing system complexity. You enjoy enabling your teammates to do their best work with clear & appropriate feedback, tailored guidance, and thoughtful workload sharing. You are deeply critical of which technical choices and work will have the most meaningful impact on our goals.\n\n\nThis role offers 160K/yr and participation in our ESOP (Employee Stock Option Program) with a 4-year vesting schedule. If you start by 1 April, you’ll be eligible for the company-wide annual 1 July pay raise. If you’re interested in the role but have questions or feedback, please email the hiring manager. No one’s resume will get buried for being critical, it’s kinda the point of the job.\n\n\nWe will accept applications through Friday, 21 February and begin the email screening process as soon as possible. Initial interviews will ideally be scheduled for 24-27 February, and second interviews the week of 10 March. There are two 90-minute interviews (hiring manager + panel) and we request 3 professional references (but let's talk anyway if you have circumstances that make that impossible). We are filling this role ASAP, preferably no later than 1 April. Please note availability concerns in your application! We can be flexible and are happy to accommodate whenever we can. \n\n\nAbout uConnect \n\n\nuConnect is on a mission to help more people realize their potential by improving access to career services for all people - early in their lives and throughout their careers. Focused on the traditional higher education market, uConnect's All-In-One Virtual Career Center is used by a wide range of institutions including UCLA, MIT, and Baton Rouge Community College to radically improve utilization of career services, career readiness and student outcomes.  We're a mission-driven team working in a fun and collaborative culture which puts people first. uConnect is backed by leading technology investors including Growth Street Partners, Strada Education and LearnLaunch.\n\n\n\nCore responsibilities\n* Collaboratively plan, document, and execute complex web application programming tasks. This is foremost an individual contributor role responsible for shipping.\n* Adhere to team coding standards and architectural principles.\n* Demonstrate advanced knowledge of one or more relevant programming languages in day-to-day use.\n* Demonstrate best practices in submitted code.\n* Make informed decisions about what qualifies as in- and out-of-scope for current tasks and communicate those decisions succinctly and thoroughly.\n* Raise concerns, questions, and ambiguities for team discussion; lead consensus-building.\n* Identify risks in current code, environment, and/or process; recommend alternatives.\n* Add automated low-level tests to code as appropriate.\n* Troubleshoot existing code for defects, performance issues, or other unwanted behavior.\n* Take ownership of overall application code base and be accountable for its long-term health, performance, and alignment with team goals.\n* Take on independent investigations or maintenance projects to enable the rest of the team.\n* Take a leadership role in overall technical decisions and direction.\n* Work cross-functionally with Product, Customer Success, and other stakeholders to identify the best outcomes possible given our goals and constraints.\n\n\n\nSecondary responsibilities\n* Assist with support and bug triage.\n* Assist with CI/CD pipeline as necessary.\n* Assist with E2E tests as necessary.\n* Improve application observability with logging and automated alerting.\n* Explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.\n* Guide and mentor other engineers of all levels with their professional growth and learning.\n* Assist with hiring engineers as requested.\n* Investigate new technologies for applicability to current and future engineering challenges.\n* Monitor the broader technology ecosystem for significant changes and brief team.\n* Respond to priority support incidents during off-hours in rare business-critical situations.\n\n\n\nWhat will a typical day look like?\n* Attend daily engineering standup (Mon-Thu). What’s blocking you, and how can you help your teammates? Sometimes we also do work refinement during this time.\n* Meet with stakeholders and peers to understand and prioritize needs.\n* Programming new product features, upgrading existing functionality, and updating dependencies and pipelines.\n* Performing code review async via pull request or synchronously via Zoom.\n* Validating application functionality through the use of both automated and manual testing.\n* Pairing with another engineer to trade experience or collaborate on a particular challenge. (We encourage pairing as needed and it shouldn’t be “never” but there’s no mandate.)\n* Researching tools, patterns and practices relevant to current or future work.\n* Writing internal documentation about technical choices, runbooks, or team practices.\n* Working with your manager to discuss and implement guidance or technical coaching plans for other engineers.\n* On Fridays (or an equivalent amount of time elsewhere in the week at your discretion), you’re encouraged to pursue team-agreed work that isn’t explicitly toward the product roadmap, like tool upgrades or technical research. We are purposefully targeting 20% of capacity toward maintenance work.\n\n\n\nCore skills & experiences (You check most of these boxes)\n* Building and maintaining Web SaaS products for at least 5 years (12+ is ideal).\n* Advanced programming experience in a Web server context, PHP strongly preferred.\n* Programming experience in JavaScript and HTML/CSS.\n* Advanced SQL query authoring and relational database design constraints.\n* Working remotely with a cross-functional team & collaborating with other engineers.\n* Task refinement & scoping, self-organization, and prioritization.\n* Team-based communication (asking for what they need and conveying challenges and timelines proactively), active listening, and consensus building.\n* Giving and receiving constructive and well-communicated code review feedback.\n* Experience with one or more web application frameworks, especially event-based (as in WordPress, not Kafka).\n* Troubleshooting DNS and web request / server response structures.\n* Validating code using test automation (unit or functional/integration).\n* Controlling major sources of application complexity and managing dependencies thoughtfully.\n\n\n\nAccretive skills (We hope you check a few of these boxes)\n* Using, designing, documenting, and building REST APIs.\n* Experience with WordPress (or similar).\n* Experience using caching layers to improve web application performance.\n* Building & improving CI pipelines (we use BitBucket).\n* Evaluating application-level security and remediation of flaws.\n* Evaluating & implementing accessibility requirements.\n* Experience with data pipelines, feed processing, and/or data migrations.\n* Working with Python (used in our data pipeline), data warehouses, and/or data visualization (We use GCP / BigQuery / Looker).\n* Iterative self-directed learning is second nature to you.\n* You’ve read resources or books like Will Larson’s Staff Engineer and are thoughtful about the strategic role of the Staff Engineer in an organization.\n\n\n\nWhy take this role?\n* High impact, high efficiency, sustainable efforts, & minimal politics. Our entire company culture is oriented to winning together, not individual interests.\n* Truly flexible work schedule with consistent effort to minimize meetings and prioritize individual needs. Unlimited PTO, 15 holidays, plus a mostly-shutdown entire final week of the year.\n* Commitment to a healthy engineering culture with a focus on great documentation, team-based work refinement, and clear acceptance criteria. We’re not done improving how we work.\n* We’re not just “committed to diversity”, we have a diverse & inclusive team and continue to iterate on policies that support it.\n* You're aligned with our mission of improving access to career services & employment outcomes for higher education students by supporting their individual needs.\n* Your 5-year plan could involve deepening your technical skills and focusing on impact as a special project “solver”, becoming the technical lead of a second product team as it forms, or transitioning into an engineering management role. (It likely does not involve becoming an overall project “architect” as that is our principal’s primary role.)\n\n\n\nCompensation package\n* $160,000 annual salary (with annual raise 1 July).\n* 4-year vesting stock options\n* Unlimited PTO (you must use at least 3 weeks; 4-6 is normal)\n* Health insurance (Gold PPO) premium 100% covered for employee & 60% for dependents (Dental 75% for employee & 50% for dependents; Vision 75% for employee)\n* 4% 401K contribution (3% full match + 2% half match)\n* $600 annual home office stipend\n* 12 weeks parental leave (after 1 year)\n* Guaranteed remote work policy (there’s no office)\n\n\n\nHiring process\n* Screening over email (call optional)\n* 90-minute alignment interview (Zoom video)\n* 90-minute functional area interview (Zoom video)\n* Pre-offer stage: (1) 60-minute Meet & Greet with CEO (Zoom video), (2) 3 references (preferably all who worked directly with you for 6 months or more; 1 senior to you in your team or reporting chain)\n* Background check (we do not automatically disqualify applicants for non-violent criminal convictions)\n\n\n\nAbout the team\n* We are fully remote, but require employees reside in the continental US or Canada due to time zones & compliance overhead.\n* We employ 7 full-time engineers (Manager, 4 Application, 1 Data, 1 QA Automation) that lean senior (2 staff-level, 3 senior-level, 2 mid-level, 0 entry — yes, that’s the scale). There is 1 product manager (with plans to grow).\n* No engineers have left the company in 3 years. Our principal engineer has been with the company 12 years. \n* We use a Kanban workflow in Jira (“kanban-like” if we’re being pedantic) with clear acceptance criteria and Gherkin for testing criteria.\n* In 2024, half our tickets were in support of our strategic roadmap, 20% were maintenance work, and the rest were requests (support escalations and other non-roadmap work).\n* We primarily build in a WordPress-based monolith with a few ancillary AWS services.\n* We have managed hosting, so there is no on-call rotation, but as a staff engineer you will be on the short-list of emergency technical contacts. (We had zero emergencies in 2024.)\n* Two years ago, we had zero automated tests. Today, we have more than 500 (300 of which are E2E) and will aggressively increase that number this year, focusing on PHP integration tests in a specific section of the product.\n* We’re publishing our interview plan, onboarding impact plan, and performance review criteria for this role. Our small team works best by being engaged, taking ownership, and exercising critical thinking every day. This role is critical to continuing and expanding that strategy, so consider coming to your interviews with good questions.\n* West coasters beware: Standup is 10:30am ET (Mon-Thu; we don’t have standing meetings on Fridays). It is our team’s only standing meeting (besides 1:1s with your manager and monthly All Hands).\n\n\n\nWhat will your 90-day onboard look like?\n* Weeks 1: Meet people, read docs, complete training, set up your localhost, ask questions. We’re not a “commit code on day 1” shop; relax & adapt. Check in with your manager daily.\n* Weeks 2-4: Dig into team’s current problem set and how you can start contributing now, while also learning medium- and long-term goals to start aligning decisions with them. Join the team’s workflow and complete prioritized work. Check in with your manager a few times a week.\n* Months 2-3: Take work that aligns with your learning goals to quickly expand your exposure to various parts of the product and stack. Make strong contributions, but more biased toward learning than highest priority, tapering back toward priority-based work toward the end of 90-days at the pace that makes sense. Choose a longer-term 1:1 pace.\n\n\n\n\n\n$160,000 - $160,000 a year\n \n\n#Salary and compensation\n No salary data published by company so we estimated salary based on similar jobs related to Design, SaaS, Wordpress, Python, Testing, JavaScript, Education, PHP, Senior, Engineer and Backend jobs that are similar:\n\n $50,000 — $100,000/year\n
\n\n#Benefits\n 💰 401(k)\n\n🌎 Distributed team\n\n⏰ Async\n\n🤓 Vision insurance\n\n🦷 Dental insurance\n\n🚑 Medical insurance\n\n🏖 Unlimited vacation\n\n🏖 Paid time off\n\n📆 4 day workweek\n\n💰 401k matching\n\n🏔 Company retreats\n\n🏬 Coworking budget\n\n📚 Learning budget\n\n💪 Free gym membership\n\n🧘 Mental wellness budget\n\n🖥 Home office budget\n\n🥧 Pay in crypto\n\n🥸 Pseudonymous\n\n💰 Profit sharing\n\n💰 Equity compensation\n\n⬜️ No whiteboard interview\n\n👀 No monitoring system\n\n🚫 No politics at work\n\n🎅 We hire old (and young)\n\n
\n\n#Location\nCambridge, MA or Remote

\nWhy you should work for ROI Developers\n\nFrequent Rotation Across Projects - If you find yourself thinking "I wish I could switch projects every 3-6 months" or "I enjoy learning new APIs", you're the right type of personality for our team.\n\nThe company specializes in custom software development. Essentially, we are a plug and play solution for mid-size businesses that require a talented team of developers. Any business in the world can benefit from software, which ensures your exposure to a wide range of industries and requirements as new projects come in. The common thread in all that variety is that our projects relate to MVC frameworks.\n\nYour income\n\nThis is a full time position paid on an hourly basis ($25 per hour for 7+ years of experience, $20 per hour for less). Said in another way, you have more control over your income.\n\nEarning money based on hourly pay means that you earn money in the exact same way that the company does: billing for time. Paying a salary would put competing incentives between the developer and the company. Instead, we tie your incentives directly in line with the company. So long as you work within our 25-35 hours per week guidelines, your income is 100% tied to how much you work.\n\nDo you do an amazing job meeting customer expectations with a minimal number of bugs? That's called job security. Customers always have their favorite developers. Make a name for yourself with quality work.\n\nROI Developers also believes that connecting income to time worked maximizes team quality. The kind of people that want to collect a salary and drag the team down are not attracted to the company. That means you will work with talented colleagues that are motivated to make you, the code and the entire team better.\n\nQuality of Life - Your work week totals 25-35 hours with 30 being the ideal amount. You can work at any time of day so long as your work hours are consistent and evenly spaced across 4-6 days per week. One of our teammates works from 11 pm - 5 am in his local time zone because that's when he wants to work. The company cares more about you working when you're at your peak mental state rather than the time of day when you work.\n\nMeetings are strictly limited to when they are necessary. Because your income is based on your time worked (which includes meetings), the company is incentivized to value and protect your work time.\n\nAn Engineer's Environment - Test driven development comes first. We do not build features until existing code passes all tests. You are assigned tasks within the repository, at which point you are expected to own the problem and fix it. Because we operate in a "no micromanaging" environment, we need a teammate that sincerely cares about the impact his/her engineering decisions will have across the project.\n\nVersion control is paramount. Commits to a project are not meant to be a fancy save button. Commits tell the team, "I have tested this feature and it's production ready."\n\nThe team practices either daily or continuous releases, depending on the project. \n\nNobody wants to get yanked out of bed to fix fires (we are not IT people on call!). Steady commits keep us looking sharp and polished to clients and keep emergencies to a minimum. We don't merge major changes or features from development branches on Fridays, for example. It's better for us and it's better for our customers.\n\nSmall Teams - The size of the company is 5 total, which we expect to number 7-8 by April. Your work is meaningful and appreciated. And because of the small team size, you have the ability to significantly influence the solutions within a project.\n\nTechnologies\n\nDjango 3.x and related apps:\n\n\n* Django REST Framework\n\n* Celery, RabbitMQ\n\n\n\n\nHTML5\n\nJavascript:\n\n\n* VUE and Vuex\n\n* Bootstrap\n\n\n\n\nDocker, Git, Cordova\n\nPostgreSQL\n\nMust haves\n\nYou must have 2+ years of direct experience with Django. Django is our MVC of choice and the technology that all developers in the organization share in common. In order to be considered for our senior level pay rate of $30/hr, you need to make your case for why you deserve to be a senior level developer.\n\nMost Django developers also work in the frontend using Javascript and HTML5. Given the choice between an expert in Django and an expert in Javascript, we would choose Django. That said, our teammates need to come on board with a strong foundation in Javascript.\n\nExperience using Git for version control.\n\nNice to haves\n\nwebpack, Docker, expertise across multiple Javascript libraries, years of experience working with multiple types of databases (especially PostgreSQL). Laravel and PHP are nice to make keep the team as a wide-ranging MVC shop, but not at all necessary.\n\nDay to Day\n\nWe intentionally avoid chatter apps like Slack or Skype. Most questions do not require an immediate reply, making threads within the repository's issue tracker our preferred method of communication. The biggest challenge for any developer is to minimize interruptions to help you spend most of your workday in the zone (ie, deep work). Keeping chatter restricted to the issue tracking system keeps conversations organized and minimizes distractions. Genuine emergencies are handled over phone calls or WhatsApp.\n\nAbout 80%+ of your time is spent architecting or writing code. The remaining time is spent on team communication - reviewing proposed solutions from teammates, clarification on requirements, etc.\n\nThe types of projects and problems you encounter are everything related to MVC frameworks. Identify business problems, abstract them into models and serve the content through a browser or mobile app. \n\n#Salary and compensation\n No salary data published by company so we estimated salary based on similar jobs related to Senior, Full Stack, Developer, Digital Nomad, JavaScript, Laravel, PHP, Git and Mobile jobs that are similar:\n\n $60,000 — $120,000/year\n
\n\n#Benefits\n 💰 401(k)\n\n🌎 Distributed team\n\n⏰ Async\n\n🤓 Vision insurance\n\n🦷 Dental insurance\n\n🚑 Medical insurance\n\n🏖 Unlimited vacation\n\n🏖 Paid time off\n\n📆 4 day workweek\n\n💰 401k matching\n\n🏔 Company retreats\n\n🏬 Coworking budget\n\n📚 Learning budget\n\n💪 Free gym membership\n\n🧘 Mental wellness budget\n\n🖥 Home office budget\n\n🥧 Pay in crypto\n\n🥸 Pseudonymous\n\n💰 Profit sharing\n\n💰 Equity compensation\n\n⬜️ No whiteboard interview\n\n👀 No monitoring system\n\n🚫 No politics at work\n\n🎅 We hire old (and young)\n\n

\nDeeply rooted in all of us are reasons for Why we make the decisions we do. At PracticeGenius we equip thousands of businesses around the globe with tools and services that more effectively engage and align their business goals and initiatives with those of their customers, advocates, and employees. \n\nBy combining the principles of behavioral economics and choice architecture with gamification, reward-loyalty systems, and social engagement functionality we’ve created a scalable platform that helps businesses of all sizes add contextual interactions and incentives to their most valued relationships.\n\nAccomplishing this takes a focused effort from a talented team. Culturally we pride ourselves on the diversity that is celebrated amongst our teams and share an affinity for intelligent minds, quality work, and exceptional customer care. We have employees distributed throughout the US and offer a remote-friendly culture and flexible in-office positions.\n\nOverview\n\nAs a Software Engineer at PracticeGenius, you’ll have a significant impact on a product used by millions of users as well as the team behind it. You’ll do this through a combination of writing code, participating in code review, collaborating remotely with engineering and non-engineering team members, and most importantly contributing your own unique experiences and perspective.\n\nOver the last several years we've made significant strides towards improving our tech stack and engineering culture. We are committed to this as a continual journey. Some technologies you'll be working with are: Laravel (primarily JSON REST APIs), MySQL, Elasticsearch, Javascript, React/Redux, webpack, CI (continuous integration), automated testing on both frontend and backend code, automated deployments, AWS, and more.\n\nJoin us as we develop fresh new product offerings as well as help drive our continued mission of improving and replacing legacy systems, constantly adopting new technologies in an environment where you are empowered to experiment and free to fail safely.\n\nWho Are You?\n\n\n* You care about product, think about end users, and take pride in the quality of your work.\n\n* Introvert or extrovert, you've got a phenomenal personality and respect for others.\n\n* You enjoy the constant challenges and learning that come with software development.\n\n* You’re not afraid to raise concerns, suggest improvements, or question the status quo.\n\n* You seek to learn from others as well as share your own knowledge and experience.\n\n* You’re a good and curious person looking to be a big part of a small team.\n\n\n\n\nWhat Are Your Skills?\n\n\n* You are proficient in PHP (Laravel experience is a plus).\n\n* You are experienced and confident in managing MySQL in production.\n\n* You communicate effectively whether on video/audio calls or in a chat environment.\n\n* You can analyze a problem and break it down into small, achievable chunks.\n\n* You can act on feedback from others and provide helpful feedback to others.\n\n* You know how to contribute to and work effectively on a distributed, remote team.\n\n* You know how to research, explore and successfully introduce new technologies.\n\n\n\n\nExamples of profiles that are relevant to us\n\n*You’ve likely had experience that falls into one or more scenarios such as:\n\n\n* Led or played a major role in the development of a system involving multiple software developers and/or teams.\n\n* Held significant ownership of a software project from its early stages, through initial development, to release and maintenance.\n\n* Revitalized and/or replaced a legacy system with more modern, appropriate technology.\n\n* Built a sizable authenticated (e.g. OAuth, JWT, etc) RESTful API-based system.\n\n* Deployed and maintained a load balanced server environment with multiple web-servers.\n\n* Introduced or owned backend technologies such as ElasticSearch, Memcached, Redis, RabbitMQ, etc.\n\n* Identified and optimized performance issues on demanding processes, whether they were database or application code oriented.\n\n\n\n\nCompensation and Benefits\n\n\n* We offer competitive salaries.\n\n* We offer several health benefit plans and a company funded FSA.\n\n* New iMac or Macbook Pro of your choice, monitors, stand up desk, and more…\n\n* Paid subscriptions/software to help you grow and excel (PhpStorm, Laracasts, egghead.io, Amazon books, etc...)\n\n* Ample paid time off, flexible work schedule, and a healthy work-life balance.\n\n* Remote-friendly. Our engineering team is fully distributed across the Western US. USA candidates only please.\n\n\n\n\nWe welcome applicants of all backgrounds, gender, age, and race. If you are unsure whether you meet the requirements or have any questions, please reach out and we'd be happy to help!\n\nWell...if this all sounds good to you and you think we might have a fit, please proceed! \n\n#Salary and compensation\n No salary data published by company so we estimated salary based on similar jobs related to Senior, Engineer, Backend, Amazon, Laravel, PHP and Excel jobs that are similar:\n\n $65,000 — $120,000/year\n
\n\n#Benefits\n 💰 401(k)\n\n🌎 Distributed team\n\n⏰ Async\n\n🤓 Vision insurance\n\n🦷 Dental insurance\n\n🚑 Medical insurance\n\n🏖 Unlimited vacation\n\n🏖 Paid time off\n\n📆 4 day workweek\n\n💰 401k matching\n\n🏔 Company retreats\n\n🏬 Coworking budget\n\n📚 Learning budget\n\n💪 Free gym membership\n\n🧘 Mental wellness budget\n\n🖥 Home office budget\n\n🥧 Pay in crypto\n\n🥸 Pseudonymous\n\n💰 Profit sharing\n\n💰 Equity compensation\n\n⬜️ No whiteboard interview\n\n👀 No monitoring system\n\n🚫 No politics at work\n\n🎅 We hire old (and young)\n\n